Love in the Time of Cholera

Key Facts
full title  Love in the Time of Cholera
author  Gabriel GarcíEscolasticaa Márquez
type of work  Novel
genre  Fiction, Romance
language  Spanish
early 1980's, bogota, colombia and mexico city, mexico 
date of first publication  1985
publisher  Penguin Books
narrator  Omniscientpoint of view  The narrator is continuously omniscient throughout the entirety of the novel and provides an objective view of each character through sequence of events, dialogue, and description. tone  The narration is written much like poetry; the language is dense and somewhat formal, though it is beautified by lyricism and rich description. Despite its very formal use of language, the poetic tone is often injected with humor. tense  Frequently shifts in tense from present to past; the book begins in the present, and makes references to a yet unknown past, which is explained later on in the book. In explaining the history of the first scenes, the author builds up to the final, current scene. setting (time)  Turn of the century

setting (place)  Fabricated, tropical Caribbean port ("District of the Viceroys"), turn of the century protagonist  Florentino Ariza and/or Fermina Dazamajor conflict  Florentino Ariza suffers for more than fifty years without Fermina Daza, his first love, and tries to win her back after the death of her husband, Dr. Juvenal Urbino. rising action  Dr. Juvenal Urbino falls to his death on Pentecost Sunday, after trying to retrieve his pet parrot from the mango tree in the yard. climax  After more than half a century, Florentino Ariza reiterates his love for Fermina Daza on the night of her husband's funeral. falling action  Florentino and Fermina, both of whom are now elderly, fall back in love on a riverboat cruise. themes  Love as an Emotional and Physical Plague; The Fear and Intolerance of Aging and Death; Suffering in the Name of Love motifs  Birds; Flowers; Water

symbols  The Yellow Flag of Cholera; The "Tiger;" A Camellia Flower foreshadowing  Jeremiah Saint-Amour's suicide, and the discovery of his secret lover foreshadows the narrative explanation of the love affair between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza. Fermina's refusal of Florentino's camellias, "flowers of promise," and the bird droppings that fall on her embroidery work when he asks for her permission to court her, foreshadow the anguish their tortured affair will entail.

ContextBorn on March 6, 1928, Gabriel García Márquez has been acclaimed as one of the finest Latin-American writers. Shortly after his birth, his parents surrendered him to his maternal grandparents, who raised him until he turned eight years old. He grew up in Aractaca, Colombia, a town nearby to the Caribbean where banana cultivation was the prime source of income. His grandfather, a retired colonel, was a Liberal veteran of the War of a Thousand Days, and often told Márquez stories of the battlefield. His grandmother was also a storyteller, and told the young Márquez tales of folklore, legends, and ghosts. The history behind Márquez's mother and father provided the writer a basis for Love in the Time of Cholera, particularly for the character of Florentino Ariza. Like Florentino Ariza, Márquez's father, Gabriel Eligio Gracia, was known as somewhat of a philanderer in the community, and was rumored to have fathered four illegitimate children. Gracia courts Márquez's mother, Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán, as Florentino Ariza courts Fermina Daza in the novel, but the girl's father, the Colonel, who is comparable to Lorenzo Daza's character, discourages the romance from developing, on account of García's tarnished reputation. Gárcia woos his beloved Iguarán with violin serenades, love poems, and innumerable letters, just as Florentino woos Fermina in the novel. Márquez's own life also parallels the events and characters of Love in the Time of Cholera. Like Fermina Daza's character, Márquez's love interest and future wife had asked that he...

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...Love in the Time of Cholerais not an engrossing love story as some will tell you; it is nothing more than a brilliant essay on the illusions of love. Set in the late 1800′s, Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza, they have a three year long affair in letters and then she ends it with one short phrase: “What is between us is nothing more than an illusion,” and then marries another. Fifty one years, nine months, and four days later, her husband Dr. Juvenal Urbino dies and her teenage flame Ariza presents himself again at the funeral. Despite all his many sexual affairs throughout his life he has supposedly saved his heart all these years for Fermina Daza alone.
Much like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Florentino Ariza is in love with soap operas and romance novels, so much so all his letters to Daza when they are young read just like one. He is so involved with the idea of romance after Fermina’s rejection of him he makes a pass time writing love letters for other couples. Ariza is all youthful passion and intensity saying, “Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything,...

...Love Conquers All
There are many themes that can be identified throughout the book, Love in the Time of Cholera. Love, as stated in the title, is one of the most important themes within the book. Love is channeled through all of the characters such as; Fermina Daza and Dr. Urbino, Florentino and all of his many affairs with different women, Dr. Urbino and his affair with Barbara Lynch, and most importantly the most powerful love throughout the book is the love between Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza.
Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza’s love started at a very young age, when they were just teenagers. He was so in love with Fermina at a young state that when he was within inches of her he couldn’t stand it. Marquez portrays Florentino’s love for Fermina when he says, “Florentino Ariza wandered like a sleepwalker until dawn, watching the fiesta through his tears, dazed by the hallucination that it was he and not a God who had been born that night” (Garcia Marquez 59). Fermina was also affected from being inches away from the boy she loved, Florentino, she merely passed out from the affect he had over here. In the book it says, “Dismayed by her own audacity, she seized Aunt Esclastica’s arm so she would not fall” (Garcia Marquez 59). This was would be the only night that they were that close to each other for the next...

...Cholera in the Time of Love
“Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbors.” -Quentin Crisp
As long as human beings live in social communities with each other, they will always be
predisposed to being consumed by the promise of both love and disease. Perhaps, love and
disease share a common purpose. Both develop from a physical exchange between two people
that make for the potential to develop immunity to pathogens. Lovemaking may create offspring
with a more diverse immune system; the spreading of bacteria like cholera may eventually find
their way inside a patient capable of fighting the bacteria thereby making the human species
more fit by passing this immunity on to offspring. The arcs of the lives of the three main
characters in relation to each other in the novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, demonstrate
Gabriel Garcia Márquez’ suggestion that behavior in response to one’s love life parallels that of
one’s behavior in response to a cholera epidemic. Marquez illuminates that one does not choose
his or her time or how to die any more than he or she chooses when or with whom to fall in love.
Neither love nor cholera discriminates against or for the cautious, the calculated, the willful, the
naive, the fickle, or the disinterested....

...The Heart's Eternal Vow |
The New York Times, 10 April 1988
A Review of Gabriel García Márquez's
Love in the Time of CholeraLove, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit single, remind us, love is strange. As we grow older it gets stranger, until at some point mortality has come well within the frame of our attention, and there we are, suddenly caught between terminal dates while still talking a game of eternity. It's about then that we may begin to regard love songs, romance novels, soap operas and any live teen-age pronouncements at all on the subject of love with an increasingly impatient, not to mention intolerant, ear.
At the same time, where would any of us be without all that romantic infrastructure, without, in fact, just that degree of adolescent, premortal hope? Pretty far out on life's limb, at least. Suppose, then, it were possible, not only to swear love "forever," but actually to follow through on it -- to live a long, full and authentic life based on such a vow, to put one's alloted stake of precious time where one's heart is? This is the extraordinary premise of Gabriel García Márquez's new novel Love in the Time of Cholera, one on which he delivers, and triumphantly.
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...Love is a powerful emotion that can cause people to act in abnormal ways. In the novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, the main character Florentino Ariza falls passionately in love with Fermina Daza. He immediately spends hours composing poetic love letters to Fermina as his entire life becomes dedicated to loving her. Fermina’s father, who greatly disapproves of the relationship between the two, decides to take his daughter to travel throughout the Caribbean. After many years of separation, when Fermina finally sees Florentino for the first time since she had been back in Hispaniola, all of her love immediately disappears after realizing she does not actually love Florentio. From that day on, Florentino would live for over a century in misery as he realizes that he cannot be with the only woman he had ever truly loved. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Ronald Wright’s novel “A Scientific Romance”, the theme of misery caused by the loss of love is relevant. Both writers use the motif of lost love, the effects of this lost love on the characters in the stories and the similar archetypes to show this theme.
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...﻿Love in the time of cholera
The main characters of the novel are Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. Both Florentino and Fermina fell in love with each other in their youth. A secret relationship blossomed between the two with the help of Fermina's Aunt Escolástica. They exchanged several love letters. However, once her father, Lorenzo Daza, finds out about the two, he forced his daughter to stop seeing him immediately. When she refuses, he and his daughter move in with his deceased wife's family in another city. Regardless of the distance, the two continue to communicate via telegraph. However, upon her return, she suddenly loses interest in Florentino. Dr. Juvenal Urbino meets Fermina and begins to court her. With her father's persuasion and the security and wealth marrying Urbino offered, they wed. Urbino is a medical doctor devoted to science, modernity, and "order and progress". He is committed to the eradication of cholera and to the promotion of public works. He is a rational man whose life is organized precisely and who greatly values his importance and reputation in society. He is a herald of progress and modernization.[1] Even after their engagement and marriage, Florentino swore to stay faithful and wait for Fermina. However, his promiscuity got the better of him. Even with all the women he was with, he made sure that Fermina would never find out. In their elderly age, Urbino...

...Love in the Time of Cholera is a story of aging love and love at different stages of life: a young love, furtive and coquettish at the beginning with Florentino and Fermina; a love learned with Dr. Urbino and Fermina when they first got married; a messy love with Florentino and his many loving exploits with widows, single women, and married ones too; angry love and unfaithful love when Dr. Urbino committed adultery with Miss Lynch and Fermina found out; love after death when Fermina lost her husband, Dr. Urbino; and lastly, aging love when at last Fermina and Florentino navigated through the Magdalena River forever. I believe that the Cholera in the title of the book is, in a way, a comparison of the symptoms of this illness and the symptoms of a person who is in love, which in different episodes in the book Florentino seems to be sick but they are only the symptoms of being madly in love.
Another theme that this book refers to is aging in the whole sense of the word. We read about Florentino, Fermina, Dr. Urbino, and even Hildebranda slowly aging and crumbling into the irreversible symptoms of becoming old: graying hair, balding, losing hearing and vision, aching and slowing bodies that will soon meet their end. But the book also touches on the dignity of...

...suggests, the novel Love in the Time of Cholera by Garcia Marquez deals with practical and nostalgic love. The author has the ability of portraying excellent determination in his eagerness to develop his stylistic range. Supporting almost a mythical quality grounded with an air of daily gossip, the novel includes descriptions of love which drift between unearthly beauty and terror. Love in the Time of Cholera is a mixture of two contrasting factors: the purity of love, and the way love is personified in everyday life.
Love in the Time of Cholera is seen almost as an anatomy of love. The novel's most original descriptions, both in an anatomical and a creative sense, could be compared to the development from seed to flower in the progression of love out of disrespectful neighborhoods of "convenience.'' Most of the meaningless attacks of day to day life, shared by two people who have bonded with each other - all the repulsive smells, undignified tasks and boring routines; all the unspoken bitterness; all the gloomy emphasis on unlived possibilities - are unmercifully described. Love's strength to grow in such dark circumstances, to rise above life's evil forces and still remain slightly unharmed, and to even stay sacred, is perhaps the most expertly...